Muppet Wiki:Style Guide
Keep the following principles in mind when editing articles. While the wiki environment means someone will always fix mistakes and make things consistent eventually, every little bit helps! Grammar * Remember to capitalize the letter M on the word "Muppet". * Present dates in full: December 11, 1992. Link to the year to allow access to the timeline (and add a reference to the relevant year article if necessary). * Use American spelling (which favors "z" spellings such as "organize" rather than "organise", and "o" spellings such as "color" rather than "colour"). * Punctuation belongs inside quotation marks. For example: ::Kermit sings "Bein' Green." is correct. ::Kermit sings "Bein' Green". is incorrect. Titles * Do not capitalize prepositions or other minor grammatical articles within titles. This includes in, of, on, and, or, and the. Do capitalize significant words, e.g. Bear in the Big Blue House, not Bear In The Big Blue House. ** Exception: Capitalize the first and last words of titles: The Street We Live On, not The Street We Live on. Formatting * Songs go in quotes: "C is for Cookie" * Album titles are italicized: Bert's Blockbusters, Abbey Road * Movie titles are italicized: The Dark Crystal * The name of a TV series is italicized, and the episode goes in quotes: the Fraggle Rock episode "The Terrible Tunnel" (episodes without formal titles have different rules): :* The Muppet Show episode 308 — referring to the guest star twice in a sentence would be awkward, so we use the production number; episode is lowercase because it is not a formal title. :* Sesame Street Episode 1839 — "Episode" is capitalized here because the number serves as the formal episode title as seen on the title card in front of nearly every episode. * After a person is identified by their full name in an article, any following references should be made using their last name. One exception to this rule may be used when describing their involvement in a scene when they're playing themselves, for example, on The Muppet Show or Sesame Street. Their first name is used by the Muppet characters, and at this point, the actors themselves become characters in the play. When behind-the-scenes information is being described, the last name should again be used. Links * You only need to create a link the first time a concept is mentioned -- so don't link Gonzo fifty times in one article. On long pages, especially where someone may come to an article and immediately navigate to a new section, exceptions can be made for a new link to a previously linked title. * Check whether links exist before creating them. There's nothing wrong with linking to non-existent articles, but the article may in fact exist under a slightly different name. * Be especially careful with capitalization in links. A link to The Street We Live On is different from a link to The Street We Live on. * Include appropriate category links in new articles (check the if you're not sure which ones to use). Anchored links An anchored link is when you link to a section of an article. These are automatically generated by having a header section in the article, for example, placing a hashtag followed by the name of the section in the Kermit article — Kermit_the_Frog#Changing_Performers — takes you right to the Changing Performers section. We can add custom tags to articles, but the code is a bit more picky. For example, Super_Grover#barber takes you right to the place in the sketch table that covers the "barber" segment without needed a section header there. These are the things you need to remember when creating them and should only be used by advanced wiki editors: * To help combat Wikia's finicky visual editors, we use the template to keep the code consistent. Place the template within the wikicode that signals the beginning of the cells in the table you want to link. Using the example above, it would look like this: |- * The unique tags — in the example, barber — need to be very simple in order for the URL to work properly. Avoid spaces between words, capital letters, and special characters such as apostrophes. * If these tags have been established on an article for some time, don't change them, as there's no easy way to use to fix them unless you go through the code of every page linking to the article to see if that tag has been used. Changing the smallest factor of the tag will discontinue its functionality. Words and phrases to avoid * "At one point Wembley does this." Describe the point at which you are referring with context so readers and other contributors can verify your addition. * Do your best not to start every bulleted item in a list with... ** "In a Letter of the Day game, Cookie Monster eats Prairie Dawn's violin and bow." ** "In The Muppet Show episode 413, Slim Wilson asks Floyd and Zoot for directions to Carnegie Hall." ** "In a Pepe's Profiles interview, Fozzie mentions he'd like to play Carnegie Hall one day." : Play around with the sentence structure so as not to make each item in the list sound so uniform. * "Recently", "in recent years", and "upcoming". We're not likely to catch each occurrence of these phrases when they're no longer relevant. Also includes specific numbers on celeb pages for ongoing movie series, show seasons, or other items that need to be updated periodically. See Thread:238201 Extras * In general, add pictures to articles using the following wiki markup: :: * Break up longer articles with headings. We use the headings "External links", "Trivia", and "Sources" often. __NOWYSIWYG__ Category:Policies and Guidelines